So, how did this case, these verdicts, change life on the streets of Toronto? And did the convictions validate the millions of dollars spent to prosecute the Galloway Boys as a criminal organization?

Freedom ends for Tyshan Riley, then the kingpin of the Galloway Boys street gang, as he is cuffed after a high-risk takedown at the Five Points Mall in Oshawa on April 19, 2004. Riley is serving a life sentence for murder

By:Betsy Powellstaff reporter, Published on Fri Sep 14 2012

The federal government introduced criminal organization legislation in 1997, largely in response to violence by outlaw motorcycle gangs in Quebec. But by 2004, police in Toronto and later in Montreal and Vancouver were using it to combat street gangs. Prosecutors in the United States had for years used federal racketeering statutes to target street gangs.

The law in Canada allows for stiffer penalties for anyone found guilty of committing crimes for the benefit of a criminal organization — which can be as few as three people. (In this country, the maximum sentence anyone can receive is life without parole eligibility for 25 years, with no additional time for being found guilty of committing murder for a criminal organization, even if someone is found guilty of multiple counts of first-degree murder. On lesser offences, such as drug trafficking, a criminal organization conviction can mean more jail or prison time.)

More practically, it gives police grounds to request a judge’s permission to intercept multiple phone calls based on the contention a group is engaged in an ongoing criminal enterprise. If the wiretap evidence collected is the equivalent of a smoking gun, it can be a persuasive tool to extract guilty pleas, as it did eventually in the case of all those arrested in the initial Galloway gang sweep.

In any case, it sets the stage for endless legal haggling.

Both sides of the bar try to prove or disprove that a group is or isn’t a criminal organization. One of the main criticisms of the legislation is that it must be applied on a case-by-case basis. In other words, the Crown must prove a group is in fact working in concert to commit crimes to benefit the group. For example, one judge may find the Hells Angels to be a criminal organization, but the case must be made each and every time.

The province of Ontario and Toronto police were quick to say Project Pathfinder demonstrated the success of prosecuting street gangs as criminal organizations. Critics — many of them defence lawyers — suggest such claims are self-serving and designed to ensure resources continue to flow to what they call public-relations exercises. As one said to me, “Authorities can say, ‘Look, we’re winning the war against crime.’”

Yet if the measure of success is a decline in gun violence in a particular area, then Project Impact in Malvern and Project Pathfinder in Galloway seemed unqualified victories. While recurring gunfire got 2004 off to a bloody start in Malvern, by year’s end residents were once again venturing outdoors to shopping malls and parks.

“Whether it was true or not, innocent people were afraid of being mowed down,” then-Toronto police superintendent Tony Warr told me in late 2004 as we sat in a food court at Malvern Town Centre. “We still have crime here, but not what was going on before, when bullets were going through people’s houses.”

Around the same time, city councillor Michael Thompson, representing Scarborough Centre, vice-chair of the mayor’s panel on community safety, said the two gang projects let the community reclaim its neighbourhood. “It has dramatically altered the perception that these people could do whatever they wanted with impunity.”

Galloway kingpin Tyshan Riley certainly acted like he was above the law, armed, dangerous and apparently convinced that nobody within his circle of influence would dare rat him out to the cops. He also counted on the community’s distrust of police to maintain a wall of silence. That’s one of the problems with widespread gang crackdowns (which is what the investigation against Riley turned into): they don’t change the way people live in these communities and may even widen the divide between residents and police.

“Gang interventions have a suppression emphasis . . . that inhibits effective relationships between the police and the community, serves to further isolate the police from the community and threatens already fragile relationships,” prominent U.S. gang researcher Scott Decker wrote in a 2007 article called “Expand the Use of Police Gang Units,” published in the Criminology and Public Policy journal.

What ought to be required reading for all Canadian policy-makers interested in curbing the growth of gangs is a 2007 study from the United States called “Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies.” It pointed to Los Angeles and Chicago as examples of “the tragic failure of the most popular suppression approaches to gangs. Despite decades of aggressive gang enforcement — including mass arrests and surveillance, huge gang databases, and increased prison sentences for gang crimes — gang violence continues at unacceptable rates.”

New York, by contrast, did not embrace such aggressive tactics and experienced far less gang violence. “When gang violence became a serious problem, the city established a system of well-trained street workers and gang intervention programs, grounded in effective social work practices and independent of law enforcement,” the study noted.

Gang crackdowns were a reactive response to clean up a problem until the next turf war. They were also expensive and placed a tremendous load on an already burdened court system. Invariably, they involved electronic surveillance — dramatically illustrated in the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire — which legal experts said was one of the reasons criminal trials were getting longer and costlier.

The alternative, some say, is to invest in jobs, schools and social programs to try to create healthy communities where young people could imagine a future that has nothing to do with selling crack and carrying a gun. But long-term initiatives lack the political payoff of hiring more police and prosecutors, which, admittedly, can have a more immediate impact on a community experiencing gang violence.

The primarily white power-brokers in places like Toronto don’t have to care about what’s happening on the fringes of their city, the kind of people who don’t generally get out to vote. “Let’s face it, most people will say: ‘As long as they’re killing each other, who gives a shit,’” Detective Sergeant Dean Burks told me after the trial ended. “The problem is, they’re not going to be just killing themselves.”

But only when gangsters come into white neighbourhoods — shooting Vivi Leimonis or Jane Creba — do the murders get national headlines or lead newscasts. If street gangs continue to proliferate in Toronto and across the country, more innocents — white and black, like Brenton Charlton and Leonard Bell — will be caught in the crossfire.

One Galloway gang member predicted it was inevitable. “It is never going to stop. The next generation is coming up,” Ernesto Gayle told Riley in a 2004 police wiretap.

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